Life After
by elenwyn
Summary: A blurred figure at the back of the auditorium might have been her dad, but she’s accumulated such a high number of ghosts that she can’t tell them apart anymore. Claire-centric one shot with hints of canon Paire.


**A.N: **Mostly Claire-centric fic I came up with when listening to Adele, "Hometown Glory".

**Spoilers up to the end of season 2 **so be warned! Also, this is canon!Paire, so don't read if you don't like it. :)

* * *

They move back to Texas after her dad's 'death'; into their old house, old ways of life. She looks around the renovated structure, all shiny and new but still _so_ familiar, and wonders how much of herself reflects in this building.

She marvels at how much of herself she doesn't recognise.

* * *

Taking a walk down the dusty streets, she stumbles across the old oil-rig, and half expects to see Zach with his bike and camera, knelt over her broken body with a look of astonishment on his face.

But when she falls this time, there's no Zach with his camera, or West with his arms around her. Just the dust settling in the afternoon sun as she pieces herself back together.

* * *

She enrols again at Odessa, feeds her classmates some half-truth about meeting her bio-family and spending some time in New York with them. They gossip and giggle about how nice it must be to have family in _Manhattan_, but she just gives a barely-there smile, and says it was alright, she guesses.

She bites back a sob as she walks past the trophy case to the locker room, bag over her shoulder.

* * *

Time passes and before long it's her 18th birthday. Her mom gets the digital camera out to film her opening her presents, exclaiming that it'd be just like old times.

The unsigned birthday card on the mantelpiece, the only contact she's had from her dad in months, and the empty chair in the corner of the sitting room indicate otherwise.

She burns it when her mom's gone to bed, along with the card and money Nathan sent her.

* * *

At college, most people can't believe she's 18, and it unnerves her. Her professors ask her if she's lost, or on a school trip or something. Her steady reply that, no, she's not, she goes here, but thank you anyway, never fails to shock them.

It never fails to shock her either when she looks in the mirror and still sees her 16 year old self staring back.

* * *

She graduates from college, decides to go into Biology after all, (that time with West rubbed off on her more than she'd realised), and her mom cries as she receives her certificate, and even Lyle has nice things to say about her for once.

A blurred figure at the back of the auditorium might have been her dad, but she's accumulated such a high number of ghosts that she can't tell them apart anymore.

* * *

Ever since her 18th birthday, she's realised she won't look any older. So when she's standing by her dying mother's bedside, she has to say she's her grand-daughter.

She offers her own blood in an attempt to save her, but Sandra only smiles softly and strokes her cheek with a withered hand, telling her that it's just her time to go, and to be brave, because that's what her father would have wanted.

Being brave seems like second nature to her by now, so she doesn't shed a tear as her mother's coffin sinks slowly into the ground.

Tries not to think about where her dad might be buried.

* * *

Time seems to fly by, and she buries her brother, his wife, their children. She passes herself off as a distant cousin of some sort, and no-one really asks any questions, which makes everything easier.

She lives like a recluse in the family home, enveloped with memories of the person she used to be. Collections of things are kept reverently in boxes, looked upon every day, but never removed.

She cries herself to sleep at night in her old bedroom, letting her tears fall on the collection of bears now gathering dust.

Wishes for the first time that, after over God-knows-how-many attempts at suicide, it would actually _work_.

* * *

She figures that she must be around 200 years old now; although she lost count years ago. The person in the mirror still reflects the same image of a teenage girl, but her eyes are dead and dulled, wrought with pain that she knew wasn't all to do with immortality.

Because she lost most of who she was the night she saw the skies of New York glow orange.

* * *

One of the days she decides to venture out, to see how much the world has changed since her self-inflicted imprisonment. The sunlight dazzles in her eyes, momentarily bringing back their light, but a cloud passes over and the moment dies, and she's left with that feeling of déjà-vu again as she walks down the once familiar paths to her old school.

Amazingly, the building's still standing. The outside is the same, but the inside's changed with the times, hallways standing empty for summer break.

She's never felt so small and insignificant walking down these corridors, marvelling how everything's changed but stayed the same at the same time; rather like her.

* * *

She climbs up the amphitheatre steps and sits on the stone concrete, enjoying the feeling of cold on her fingertips. A silhouette appears at the entrance and she freezes, thinking for a moment that it's a Company associate come for her at last.

But as she strains to get a closer look, the figure comes closer, morphing into another one of her ghosts, this one with dark hair and a lop-sided grin.

* * *

Hours later, tangled in between his arms and her duvet, she realises she's fixed something she never realised was broken; her heart.


End file.
